One goal of the present invention is to mitigate and/or obviate the disadvantages of the conventional energy delivery methods to subterranean environments to assist hydrocarbon production from same. These conventional methods include the current fields of steam floods, hot oil treatments, down hole combustion, fire floods, electrical heaters, and other hot fluid injection methods known to those familiar to the art of oil and gas production. The special class of monopropellants used by this invention are mixed and prepared at surface and thereafter transmitted to subterranean depths and in some cases to sub-sea depths in marine hydrocarbon recovery applications. This invention has advantages over the injection and catalytic combustion and catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, hydrazine, Otto Fuel, monopropellant blends, and other oxygenated fuel systems used to combust or decompose and inject heat into wells and subterranean reservoirs. The invention includes methods and apparatuses to transmit, combust, inject, control the energy released therefrom, and transfer heat from chemicals combusted in catalytic devices for the industrial purpose of enhancing oil and gas production from wells. Furthermore, the invention includes methods and apparatuses to, at least partially, transform fluid systems to their supercritical state by blending various fluid systems and using this described methods devices to transfer energy to these fluids systems to reach temperature and pressure that places them, or at least some components of them, in a thermodynamic state of a supercritical fluid.
When constructing a well bore in the earth and thereafter extracting well fluids, the ability to transmit heat down into the earth in the limited space of a typical well bore is of extreme economic interest. This heat is used to mobilize subterranean reservoir fluids from the earth, melt and maintain flow in well conduits and flow lines, and assist in artificially lifting fluids from wells. Monopropellant fluids that store large amounts of energy such that chemical reactions such as combustion, catalytic decomposition, offer a means to release large amounts of heat in a well using submersible catalytic combustor methods combined with novel submersible apparatus.
This need for transporting and releasing large amounts of energy from the surface to a subterranean environment arises firstly in the actual construction of the well bore where energy generated at surface is required to turn the drill bit located significant distances from the surface of the earth. This drilling phase of construction normally requires a drill stem of pipe to be disposed in the well with a drilling bit on the distal end of the drill stem. Typically, energy is transmitted using hydraulic power through the drill stem to the drill bit by the rotation of the drill string from a surface device commonly referred to as the drilling rig rotary table. The surface rotary table of the rig engages the drill stem at the proximal, or surface end, of the drill stem, and turns the entire drill stem imparting torque to through the drill stems total length thereby transmitting the surface power to the down hole drill bit on the distal end of the drill stem. This is commonly referred to as rotary drilling by those familiar with the art of well drilling.
The current rotary drilling method loses a significant portion of the energy imparted at the surface of the drill stem before the energy can be used at the drill bit to make the well bore. This energy is lost in drag of the rotating drill stem in the well bore. Moreover, as wellbores are constructed with inclined or deviated directions as is now increasingly common in what is known as horizontal wells, the drag and torque induced by the friction of the drill pipe turning inside these deviated well bores further increases energy losses transmitted from surface to the down hole drilling bit. To overcome this large drag and loss of energy between the drill bit and the surface rotary table of the rig, methods of hydraulic drilling motors have been developed. These hydraulic drilling motors also are powered by surface energy, typically large pumps referred to by those familiar with the art of well drilling as mud pumps. These surface mud pumps then transmit large volumes of high pressure mud through the drill stem to the down hole drilling motor, which in turn is connected to the drill bit and thusly rotates the drill bit. This method avoids the large drag and frictional losses of classical rotary drilling, but it too has energy losses between the surface and the down hole bit as well, wherein the high pressure drilling mud fluid being pumped down the drill string to power the drilling motor experiences fluid friction as it is being pumped down to the drilling hydraulic motor on the distal (i.e., downhole) end of the drill stem connected to a drilling bit. Therefore, the deeper or longer the well, the more fluid friction in the drill stem is increased. It then becomes incumbent on the driller to run larger drill stem pipe or increase the surface horsepower to pump at ever higher pressures the drilling mud to the down hole drilling motor. What is needed is the ability to transmit power to the subterranean drill strings with less losses than is currently incurred with rotary or down hydraulic motor drilling methods.
Further use of drilling is required during the life of the well, for example during the drilling out of frac plugs, or cement plugs, again requiring a rig or large surface hydraulic pumps to power the down hole drilling motor that subsequently rotates the drill bit. Drilling is currently performed by the mechanical action of milling of the material at the distal end of the drill pipe with a drilling bit. This has the deleterious effect of wearing out the drill bit over time, and the subsequent removal of the drill stem from great depths to replace the drill bit. The current drilling methods all teach away from using heat to improve the drilling operations. The literature discuss in great detail the delirious effects of heat on drilling bits, drilling motors, and down hole drilling logging tools. The methods of the present invention use the advantageous use of heat for drilling, particularly in the field of drilling out plugs placed in horizontal wells between frac stages. This addresses the current need for a method to remove material from well bores that is not restricted to the milling and abrasive methods of the current state of the art in well drilling. What is currently needed in the art to this point, is a method and apparatus to drill out frac plugs, bridge plugs, and other down hole equipment designed to be removed with heat such that these plugs can be removed with chemical heating methods and apparatus of my invention where heat is used to enhance the removal of said plugs.
There exist other industrial processes that make use of energy in subterranean environments. Many of these processes are designed to specifically to transfer heat to a down hole reservoirs or well bore. It is of great economic interest to heat down hole environments to mobilize and enhance the production of subterranean fluids in both the fields of secondary and tertiary recover flooding methods and in the field of well stimulation.
The use of injecting heated fluids into wells and reservoirs has been practiced for many years to remove solid substances such as paraffin, hydrates, asphaltenes, diamondoids, and waxes from oil and gas well flow production tubing, wellheads, subsea flow lines, and surface flow lines. Today this is commonly done by heating oil or other fluids at surface in what is known in the oil and gas industry as a “hot oil trucks” wherein the pumping of hot oil through a surface propane heater mounted on the “hot oiler truck” is then pumped down through a well conduit, into the reservoir. The current industry methods are directed toward injecting the heated fluids that melt these substances firstly down the plugged tubular, and then secondly into the reservoir. This hot oil method currently used then melts waxes, paraffin, asphaltenes, diamondoids, gas hydrates, and other substances that have accumulated in production conduits, like production tubing, well heads, and flow lines at the surface of the earth and in subsea flow lines. These methods of melting these substances by pumping hot oil and dissolving them in the hot oil re-injects this hot oil with these now melted substances back into the well reservoir. The current methods of injecting the hot oil treatment fluids back into the reservoir result in the deleterious effect that these substances now melted, fluidized, and transported into the subterranean reservoir can cause plugging in the reservoir. Moreover, the current methods of reinjection of these melt materials with hot oil results these same melted solids that were fluidized back into the reservoir being eventually produced back up the well conduit, wellhead, and flow lines where they once again cool off and precipitate hence they are an impediment to flow of oil and gas from the reservoir to the surface. This hot oil method and other fluid heating methods currently practiced by the industry has to be repeated more and more frequently as the waxes and other substances after being dissolved and injected back into the reservoir tend to have shorter and shorter time intervals between the time the well can produce fluid until it plugs with these substances. In offshore applications, a field of study has been developed within the offshore industry, known to those involved in the industry of producing oil and gas offshore, as flow assurance. What is needed is a means to heat and melt these substances that plug well tubulars, wellheads, and flow lines and indeed to prevent them from occurring. My invention teaches methods and apparatus that do not require the injection into the reservoir of the hot fluid with the melted substances but conversely offers a means to produce these melted substance in the heated fluid to surface without injecting them into the reservoir. The invention described herein combines the solvency power of the heated fluid of catalytic combustion with the a method of allowing the exhaust gases of the catalytic combustion to lift the melted substance to surface without being re-injected in the reservoir.
Additionally, the ability to enhance oil and gas production by heating the subterranean reservoir or the reservoir fluids in the subterranean environment encompasses a broad field in the oil and gas industry known as Enhanced Oil Recovery, EOR. The methods of EOR are used to recover increased reserves of light crude oil, heavy oil, and tar sand. Indeed vast reserves of shale oil, known to those familiar with the art of hydrocarbon extraction as kerogen, exist in North America and other locals where no commercial process or industrial method has been discovered to recover kerogen and other organic matter locked in the rock structures. In the Green River Basin of Colorado and Wyoming the actual reservoir fluid is referred to as “shale oil” but is actually kerogen. This fluid is highly immobile in the natural subterranean strata. The mining of the shale and surface retorting to recover the kerogen have significant delirious cost and environmental effects. The key to the recovery of such reserves is the commercial application of subterranean heat to mobilize the kerogen.
The current art of Enhanced Oil Recovery, EOR and SAGD is directed toward the use steam heated on the surface of the earth, or electrical heating elements disposed in the earth, to recover oil shale, otherwise known as kerogen. deposits and reserves of the United States of America. The current methods teach towards generating heat or electrical power at the surface of the earth. Some method use heating elements to heat a subterranean environment which removes the combustion of hydrocarbons necessary to generate the electrical power and the subsequent down heat from the well site to a central electrical power plant where hydrocarbons are combusted to generate electrical power. Injecting surface created steam suffers from massive losses of heat to the earth as it is transported to the well and down the well, and little of the heat generated affects the reservoir and subterranean fluids of interest. What is needed is a means to create hot fluids in-situ as opposed to the means currently taught of creating hot fluids at surface and or using surface combustion of hydrocarbons to generate electrical power used for down hole heaters.
The current art of secondary or enhanced oil recovery is directed toward methods that consume vast amounts of fresh water. Those skilled in the art of EOR, inject hot fluids to transfer the heat with fluids out into the subterranean reservoir away from the well bore to mobilize and increase the hydrocarbon production. This is often done with steam generated at surface in large central steam plants and the piped along the surface to injection wells. The use of steam to mobilize in-situ hydrocarbons requires vast amounts of fresh water. Many places on the earth have a shortage of low cost fresh water, and the use of fresh potable water for the recovery of hydrocarbons compete with society's basic need for fresh water for both personal and agricultural use. In Southern California, for example, it is estimated that it takes nine barrels of fresh water to produce one barrel of crude oil in the steam flood operations. Moreover, most electrical power in the United States is generated with by burning coal or natural gas creating steam from fresh water and thereafter used in the classical Rankin Cycle to turn steam turbines and electrical generators. Therefore, electrical power plants systems used to generate electrical power which is in turn used to heat subterranean reservoirs with electrical heaters further consumes valuable fresh water as all those familiar to the art of steam generation know that the water used to make steam must be fresh water. Therefore, the current state of the art EOR methods involve the use of massive amounts of fresh water being consumed at surface to recover oil, bitumen, tar, condensates, and kerogen. Thereafter, the fresh water steam is inject into the subterranean reservoir environment in what is known to those familiar with the art as “steam flooding” or a special case of steam flooding well known to those in the Canadian Athabasca tar sands as Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage or SAGD. In either method the steam mixes with the fluid in the subterranean environment and becomes unfit for human consumption and in many cases unfit for re-use as fresh water to generate more steam for the flood. The current EOR methods thusly take fresh water from the surface of the earth and contaminate it with down hole fluids and solids where it becomes un-fit for human or agricultural use. What is needed is a means to recover hydrocarbons in the secondary and tertiary recovery phases, often referred to as EOR that includes a reduction of the fresh water contamination and consumption as compared to currently used methods.
The current methods of creating steam at the surface of the earth typically comprise combustion of significant amounts of hydrocarbon fuels on the surface of the earth. For example, in Southern California oil fields of Kern County and the Athabasca tar sands of Canada and other locals where steam flooding and SAGD methods are practiced, natural gas is combusted in massive surface boilers to create steam. The combustion of the natural gas on the surface emits carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, such that in order to recover subterranean hydrocarbons surface combustion of hydrocarbons is taught having the delirious result of releasing combustion gases to the atmosphere. What is needed is a means to practice enhanced oil recovery such that the energy used in the process does not emit combustion gases at the steam plant or at an electrical power generation plant but conversely releases and advantageously uses combustions gases below the surface of the earth.
The current methods of using steam for enhanced oil recovery involve the generation of steam at surface. Creating steam at the surface of the earth and transporting it to subterranean depths is challenged by the loss of heat to the earth's overburden strata thusly reducing the heat that can be injected into the subterranean hydrocarbon reservoir to enhance oil recovery. Steam floods below 3,000 feet are uncommon and in most places uneconomical due to the heat losses during transportation and injection over such distances. Steam floods below 5,000 feet are usually not attempted as very little heat from surface generated steam can be injected into the 5,000 feet or greater depths. What is needed are methods to create heat at subterranean depths. This invention teaches means to combust a portion of the reservoir fluids as an in-situ fuel which is indeed the crude oil, condensate, kerogen, tar, natural gases and other in-site hydrocarbons which are to be produced to surface and commercialized. The invention described herein includes methods and apparatus to combust some portion of the hydrocarbon fluid in the reservoir as a fuel to generate down hole heat.
Fire floods or in-situ combustion has been attempted and in some reservoirs. The current art includes the use of igniting the in-situ hydrocarbon as a fuel by delivering oxygen from surface in the form of oxygen gas, liquid oxygen, compressed air, or liquid air. However, the current methods which have also included the use of air injection or oxygen injection cannot feasibly be used in a large number of reservoirs as the remaining hydrocarbons or kerogen will not sustain combustion or self ignite. What is needed is a means to initiate and sustain down hole combustion using either or the in-situ hydrocarbon for fuel or fuels from surface. To accomplish this combustion, a method is needed to ignite this in-situ fuel with a non-toxic, non-corrosive, igniter method, and thereafter sustain combustion with an oxidizer from the surface.
The ignition and sustained burn of this in-situ fuel to thereby heat the reservoir and reservoir fluids and mobilize the hydrocarbon fluids is non-trivial and non-obvious as hundreds of millions of research dollars have been spent over many decades by various large billion dollar companies without successful commercialization of shale oil such as that found in Colorado and Wyoming. The currently unrecoverable hydrocarbon reservoirs are so vast and the discovery of economical means to recover this vast wealth is so large that some companies have expended significant efforts to this end. The invention described herein discloses new methods and apparatuses to ignite and sustain in-situ combustion and reservoir heating using novel catalytic combustion heating methods.
Current methods and apparatus known to the oil and gas industry are primarily directed toward igniting fluids in-situ including the reservoir, hydrocarbons. They employ technologies that are significantly different from the present invention in that they are directed toward injecting air or oxygen and using catalytic combustion products to ignite reservoir fluids. The present invention is directed toward heating with catalytic combustion products non-oxygenated fluids to enhance hydrocarbon recovery by raising fluids to their supercritical thermodynamic state as they injected and flowed through a reservoir. One embodiment of the present invention is directed toward using catalytic decomposition and combustion products to heat non-oxygenated surface injected such that said fluids enter reservoirs above their respective super critical pressure and temperature and thusly be in the supercritical fluid phase in the hydrocarbon reservoir. For example of current methods teaching to combust in-situ reservoir fluids, the methods of Pfeffferle in U.S. Pat. No. 7,874,350 supplies oxygen or air to be ignited by a down hole catalytic combustion device to enhance reservoir fluid combustion in a well. Secondary and tertiary oil and gas recovery injection fluids can be enhanced with the heat energy release methods and apparatus enabled by my invention. Several of my invention embodiments use catalytic combustion to create supercritical fluids in wells. These embodiments do not require the combustion of the very hydrocarbon one is attempting to produce to surface.
Disclosed herein are new methods and apparatuses to allow for fluids to be used as supercritical flood and stimulation fluids whilst not combusting in-situ hydrocarbons to enhance oil and gas recovery from conventional oil and gas reservoirs, and unconventional subterranean strata and deposits such as oil shale, kerogen deposits, coal bed methane, diatom deposits, tar deposits, bitumen deposits as well as enhanced extraction methods to recover subterranean minerals through wells using the injection of super critical fluids as solvents in subterranean strata. For example, fluid solvents such as fresh water, natural gas, carbon dioxide, ammonia, propane, pentane, hexane, acids, and many other fluids enhance their ability to dissolve organic compounds and mineral deposits using my inventions methods of creating supercritical fluids which are injected into reservoirs at or above their super-critical state conditions. However, the industry teaches away from using fluids other than CO2 as supercritical solvent recovery or flooding methods as other fluids require a much harsher thermodynamic conditions than does CO2 to reach the supercritical state, or these other fluids with low super critical temperatures exist as gases at surface ambient conditions making it difficult to compress and pump into wells. For example my invention enables the use of ammonia as a supercritical fluid for enhanced oil and gas recovery methods as well as fracture stimulation and matrix reservoir injection stimulation. Supercritical fluids have many advantages over gases or liquids not held at or above their supercritical state in the field of secondary and tertiary oil and gas recovery as well as in-situ leaching of minerals and elements, as a fluid in a supercritical state has near zero surface tension, vastly improved solvency capacity, high diffusivity, high mass transfer, and very low viscosities. Moreover, supercritical fluids solvency power can be further enhanced by blending into them a family of micro-emulsions often referred to as micelle solutions. By using this inventions methods of subterranean in-situ heating new super-critical fluids and blends never before used for enhanced oil and gas recovery can be designed and used at their super critical state in wells allowing them to be injected into subterranean strata as super critical fluids. Super critical fluids enhance a fluids solvency ability, their ability to improve the sweep efficiency of the strata, and thereby enhance the recovery of hydrocarbon or minerals from wells.
Turning to the case of ammonia as a supercritical fluid for oil and gas recovery is illustrative of how the present invention enables the use of a new EOR fluid that to recover increased amounts of oil and gas from reservoirs. CO2 has been very successfully used as a solvent flood fluid by oil and gas companies. These companies have purchased mature and non-commercial oil fields that have had through primary production and secondary water floods recovered 20-30% of their oil and gas in place. Rather than abandon the wells they discovered that the use of supercritical fluids could vastly improve the oil that could be recovered from these mature water flood fields. The industry has focused on the use of CO2 as a supercritical fluid largely because CO2 reaches the supercritical state under relatively mild conditions; it only needs to reach a temperature of approximately 88° F. (degrees Fahrenheit) and a pressure of approximately 1070 psi to become a supercritical fluid. To those familiar with the art of oil and gas production it is known that many oil reservoirs exist at geothermal temperatures above 88° F. Indeed, the geothermal gradient in most the world such that this supercritical temperature for CO2 is reached at less than 1000 feet. Also, the ability to inject CO2 above the supercritical point requires that the reservoir into which the CO2 is being injected should allow injection pressure in the reservoir to sustain pressures above the supercritical pressure of CO2 of approximately 1070 psi. It is well known to those familiar to oil and gas production that most reservoirs below 1000 ft have a fracture pressure above 1000 psi, hence the reservoirs can withstand CO2 injected at or above super critical conditions of 88° F. and 1070 psi. Water on the other hand has to be injected at approximately 705° F. and 3200 psi. There are approximately less than 1% of the world's oil and gas reservoirs that have a geothermal temperature at or above 705° F. Therefore, water is not a convenient supercritical fluid as it requires a vast amount of energy to reach its supercritical state. Ammonia on the other hand does not need to be heated as high as water to become supercritical.
Ammonia can be injected as a supercritical fluid at approximately 270° F. and approximately 1643 psi. Therefore, what is needed to make ammonia an interesting alternative or indeed used as an alternating fluid with CO2 floods is the ability to increase the down hole injection temperature of ammonia to at least 270° F. The present invention provides this possibility by using a method of in-situ catalytic combustion of a monopropellant heater for the injected ammonia. Mature oil and gas fields are only feasibly available for supercritical fluid floods currently if and only if they are near a CO2 source or a CO2 pipeline. CO2 for flooding oil reservoirs is difficult to obtain, and is limited to those reservoirs that can access or build large pipelines from CO2 sources to the mature oil and gas fields they wish to flood. Because of the super solvency of CO2 as a super critical fluid pipelines have been built from as far away as Utah to mature oil fields in West Texas and great increases in oil production have been recorded over the classic non-supercritical fluid floods with water. Ammonia as a supercritical flood fluid. Ammonia has a vast network of pipelines running across, many parts of North America, Canada, and other parts of the world near or through oil fields. These pipeline systems that cover a vast portion of the U.S. are currently not near CO2 pipelines. Hence the present invention has the potential of enabling the recovery of vast new reserves of oil and gas in America and Canada by opening up these areas to take advantage of the ammonia pipeline networks and use new supercritical fluid as a flood fluid, namely ammonia Moreover, my invention teaches the use of ammonia in conjunction with other super critical solvent flood fluids, like CO2, propane and water.
The oil and gas industry has only been able to use natural gas, flue gases, and CO2 as supercritical flood fluids. The invention now teaches how to enable ammonia as a supercritical fluid for well stimulation and enhanced oil recovery. Additionally, the present invention provides methods and apparatus to make water a supercritical fluid for such use as stimulation, hydraulic fracturing, and enhanced oil and gas recovery. Water is an available flood fluid in many areas of the world, but it has to be raised to a temperature of 705° F. and simultaneously a pressure of 3200 psi. Moreover, the present invention now allows ammonia to be heated to supercritical fluid temperatures for downhole use. However, the inventor has discovered that the supercritical temperature of water can be lowered by blending in other fluids prior to heating like ammonia. For example, by adding 50% ammonia by mass fraction to water the blended fluid only needs to be raised to a temperature of approximately 529° F. as opposed to waters supercritical temperature of approximately 705 degrees Fahrenheit. Other fluids can be blend with water to lower the blends' supercritical temperatures. However, my invention teaches means to not only increase the geographical areas now available to these new supercritical flood fluids, but my invention also greatly extends the depths to which supercritical fluids can be injected and used as my invention heats the injected fluids in-situ such that heat is not lost over long deep distance of injection from surface heat sources. For example, it is well known that steam floods can only be performed within in the field of commercial applications at depths shallower than 3,000 feet as current steam flood technology teaches toward steam generation at surface and then injection down hole. My inventions method of heating flood fluids at the down hole depths eliminates the heat loss current technology steam flood methods where the steam has to be transported from surface down hole for the commercial purpose of increasing the recovery of oil, gas, tar, condensate, bitumen, kerogen.
It is understood that one embodiment of my invention teaches toward the use of these new supercritical fluids in oil and gas flood projects wherein an injection well is used to inject the supercritical fluid into a subterranean reservoir and the fluid proceeds out into the reservoir and mobilizes reservoir fluids which are recovered in separate production wells and produced to surface. However, my invention further teaches that a well can be used as an injection well, and then after the injection of my inventions supercritical fluid the same well can be used to produce newly mobilize hydrocarbon fluids from the reservoir and well to surface. This is known as a huff and puff oil and gas recovery method enhanced with my inventions ability to convert new a novel fluids into supercritical fluids for reservoir injection.
It is understood by those familiar with oil and gas production that my inventions method of heating fluids to at least their supercritical temperatures, and pressurizing them above their supercritical pressure whilst maintaining the supercritical temperature, and injecting these supercritical fluids into reservoirs is not limited to the field of flooding wells. My invention also teaches heating methods for stimulating wells with injections on an intervention basis, known to those in the oil and gas industry as the field of matrix stimulation and fracture stimulation. It is further understood by those familiar with the art of mineral extraction that my well construction and fluid injection methods and apparatus taught herein allow for minerals to be extract through wells from great depths both on land and offshore using supercritical fluids heated and pressurized with my invention. Because the supercritical fluid methods of my invention enable offshore subterranean minerals mining besides oil and gas mining, this invention enables vast new areas of the earth to be exploited for minerals never before possible. Those familiar with lixiviant fluids being used for in-situ mineral extraction will understand how my invention enables supercritical fluids to be used as an extraction method for offshore subterranean mineral extraction.
It is also recognized by those familiar with the art of enhanced oil and gas that a given reservoir and the fluids therein may have their sweep and recovery efficiency enhanced by adding micro-emulsion surfactant technology to these new super critical fluids, and that the flood can be enhanced by changing the supercritical fluid injected from time to time. That is one can start a flood on supercritical water, then phase in stages of supercritical ammonia, followed by stages of supercritical propane, followed by a stage of supercritical CO2, depending on the reservoir and in-situ hydrocarbon characteristics. It is further recognized that these staged fluids may contain different blends of micro-emulsions and diverter additives to further enhance the sweep efficiency of the flood.
This invention further teaches that the supercritical fluids that are injected are in many cases separated and recovered from the produced reservoir fluids and minerals. Therefore, the new fluid required during a flood project may reduced by re-cycling the supercritical fluid by means producing it to surface, and separating it from the produced fluids. This separation can be performed with distillation, refrigeration, gravity separation, heat, bubble towers, and other separation methods.
The oil and gas industry often needs to add energy to well environments to remove fluids from the wells. This can be done with several means known to those familiar with the art of artificial lift including gas lift means, and submersible pumping means. However, the current methods are often uneconomical in deep gas wells where the cost of deploying and operating the industries current hydraulic, mechanical, and electrical submersible devices is not commercial. What is needed is a method to transmit into a well hydraulically a chemical fluid that can be combusted in a controlled manner in-situ such that the released energy of combustion can be converted to work through various devices and machines. Furthermore, it is useful that such a fluid have combustion products that are not corrosive to the well conduits. In order to combust in-situ a fluid needs a fuel and an oxidizer. Therefore, this invention uses monopropellant fluids that contain both.
What is needed are new methods and apparatus that allow for the controlled catalytic combustion of fluids in subterranean wells to enhance the production of hydrocarbons, kerogen, tar, bitumen, and minerals from subterranean depths.